Relational Formations of Race

Theory, Method, and Practice

Natalia Molina

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780520299665
• eBook ISBN: 9780520971301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

Relational Formations of Race brings African American, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, and Native American studies together in a single volume, enabling readers to consider the racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another. These essays conceptualize racialization as a dynamic and interactive process; group-based racial constructions are formed not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to other devalued and marginalized groups. The chapters offer explicit guides to understanding race as relational across all disciplines, time periods, regions, and social groups. By studying race relationally, and through a shared context of meaning and power, students will draw connections among subordinated groups and will better comprehend the logic that underpins the forms of inclusion and dispossession such groups face. As the United States shifts toward a minority-majority nation, Relational Formations of Race offers crucial tools for understanding today's shifting race dynamics.

PART ONE

Theorizing Race Relationally

The chapters in this section explore the theories and methods that undergird the relational study of race, as well as the new analytical insights produced through these frameworks. In the “Race as a Relational Theory” roundtable discussion, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández reflect on the personal and professional experiences that led them to study race relationally. Their dialogue sheds light on how such work often requires scholars to go beyond their immediate area of expertise organized around the histories, cultures, and politics of specific racialized groups. To study race relationally is to place one’s work in a dialogue with events, people, and literature that may not immediately seem to resonate with or influence the conventional frameworks of one’s scholarship. In doing so, scholars often need to cede the conceit that they can entirely master a broad range of new literature, archives, or other primary sources. Instead, scholars must ask new questions about their object of study in order to acknowledge the limitations of their scholarly training, field, methods, and sources.

Along with shedding light on how studying race relationally works as theory and method, Lipsitz, Sánchez, and Lytle Hernández highlight how studying race relationally can help us know and better address social justice issues in collaboration with the communities we serve. As Lytle Hernández says, “[I saw] that to unravel anti-Blackness, I was going to have to take on what was happening with the undocumented folks, and antibrownness, and also think through indigeneity. It is [a sense of] solidarity but is also an understanding that it’s not just relationships. It’s that your freedom is my freedom. Your struggle is my struggle. Your sacrifice is my sacrifice.”

Some of us in this volume have come to a relational approach to race by necessity. We may have not started out thinking of the need to study race relationally, but the complexities of our subjects, respondents, or other actors in our narratives all called for a more complex lens than one that tackled one racialized group at a time. This is the subject explored by Natalia Molina in her essay, “Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens.” Molina argues that we should examine Chicana/os in relation to other racialized groups in order to develop a fuller understanding of how racial categories form and operate. The chapter highlights different models of relational work by examining key works in Chicana/o history that have also employed a relational methodology. In addition, the chapter demonstrates how we can use organizing principles other than race to find links between racialized groups. By revisiting key events in Chicana/o history and examining them through a relational lens, Molina demonstrates the new insights we gain when we interrogate how groups are racialized in relation to one another. She argues for the necessity of pulling back the lens and adopting a relational approach even when examining the experiences of a single racialized group, because “the very framework that comprises our understanding of race is necessarily and inseparably drawn from the experiences of racialized groups vis-à-vis other racialized groups.” Chicano/a historians have long argued that histories of the mainstream are incomplete if they do not consider the influence of racialized groups; similarly, she says, “the study of any single racialized group calls for an understanding of the impact of the experiences of other similarly situated groups.”

In his essay, “Entangled Dispossessions: Race and Colonialism in the Historical Present,” Alyosha Goldstein illuminates how studying race relationally can serve as the glue that connects seemingly disparate histories/moments in time. Goldstein’s essay examines the historical entanglements of U.S. colonialism, racial capitalism, and the economies of expendability as they extend into the present. The primary focus of the chapter is the Claims Resolution Act (CRA) of 2010, legislation that brought together and financed a series of milestone U.S. civil rights and Native American class-action lawsuit settlements. The chapter considers how and why the CRA brings into proximity discrepant yet connected histories of dispossession and racism and attempts to situate them within an overarching teleology of progress in the face of economic volatility and social instability. The analysis reveals the significance of the differential devaluation of racialized groups and the dynamics of settler colonialism for understanding the relationship between anti-Black racism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

Studying race relationally allows us to see how systems of power, such as settler colonialism and white supremacy, operate in interlocking ways. Goldstein turns to legal cases to examine how ethical and juridical reconciliation shed light on—as well as attempt to erase and contain—a history of racist discriminatory laws. It is only by examining African Americans and Native Americans in relation to one another that we can see the interconnections among their histories of dispossession, colonization, enslavement, and differential racialization, and how these histories continue to shape the present, even as the logic of juridical settlement strives to obscure such connections. This work is vital. As Goldstein reminds us, “Studying racial formation as material practices of relational racialization rather than as distinct taxonomies provides a way of confronting how white supremacy in the United States continues to sustain colonial possession and the social exploitation and disposability of racially devalued people as mutually constitutive today.”

ONE

Race as a Relational Theory

A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

George Lipsitz, George J. Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández, with Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina

This roundtable features three scholars who have produced some of the most groundbreaking and generative work on the relational study of race: George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández. Recorded at the University of Southern California in December 2016,¹ their wide-ranging discussion addresses the particular role of Los Angeles and California in relational studies of race; the challenges of teaching and research using a relational framework; and the importance of such frameworks beyond the academy.

George Sánchez, author of the award-winning Becoming Mexican American (Oxford University Press, 1993), has spent more than two decades chronicling the complex multiracial relationships in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles through an array of research, teaching, and public impact projects, including collaborations with several local museums and history projects.

George Lipsitz has authored dozens of articles and books that incorporate a relational framework, including many works that address the particular role of music, the arts, and other forms of cultural production in this process. He is also the editor of Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, one of the first scholarly journals to explicitly foreground a relational framework.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is the author of the celebrated Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging, 1771–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Both works exemplify the most far-reaching and sophisticated insights that can be produced through relational studies of race.

DANIEL MARTINEZ HOSANG AND NATALIA MOLINA: Can you describe for us how your teaching and research came to address and incorporate relational frameworks of race?

GEORGE LIPSITZ: I don’t think there are many people who set out to say, “I am going to do a comparative and relational ethnic studies project.” I think they found it in the complexity of the world. And I think that had two ramifications. One, it meant that they had to break with this notion of a one-at-a-time relationship with whiteness for each aggrieved group. We didn’t know until we were doing the comparative and relational work that there was an uninterrogated privileging of whiteness that had been there—the issue was [always] “How does each group deal with the white center?” not “How are polylateral relations among aggrieved communities of color formulated?”

There is this line in a Chester Himes article in the Crisis.² He was writing about the Zoot Suit Riots and the Japanese internment. And he basically said, “I came to Los Angeles, and it hurt me worse than Cleveland. And it hurt me racially worse than any place I have seen. But until I saw the Zoot Suiters getting attacked, I secretly thought it was something wrong with us. When I saw what they were doing to the Japanese, saw what they were doing to the Mexicans, I realized it was them, not us. And rather than apologizing or explaining ourselves, we had to basically see that there is a system at work there.” Himes reiterated this line of thought in his 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, where he describes “little Riki Oyana” singing “God Bless America” and being hauled off to the internment center at the Santa Anita racetrack the next day.³ I think most of the work that will come to the fore of the studies we talk about comes from the ways in which race becomes transposed into mass incarceration, environmental racism, descriptions of nonnormative sexual and gender behavior, and low-wage labor. None of these issues can be solved one group at a time. So part of the difficulty of [most] racial studies is that you take the tort model of law and say, “There but for race, people would have been OK.” But we know that race is intersectional. It’s the life of the party; it never goes anywhere alone. Because race has to do with differential citizenship, lesser citizenship, premature death, disproportionate exposure to violence, it makes you look at more than one group. But I also think it’s important for us not to privilege one way of looking at things and say we always want things to be comparative and relational. There is a time to [look at things] together; there is a time to [look at them] apart. There are things that are enabled by looking comparatively and relationally, and there are things that are inhibited by it.

GEORGE SÁNCHEZ: I didn’t enter looking for relational approaches, but I was drawn there by the consistency of what I kept finding. And so my first book, Becoming Mexican American, though now people look at it and they think, “Oh, relational this, relational that.” I didn’t see that at all. To me, [getting to the idea of the relational] was a learning process of having been trained in an older ethnic studies model and attempting to stay focused on the subject at hand and constantly being pushed. But also realizing that while on the one hand [relationality] did happen everywhere, on the other hand, it manifested itself in certain places in certain kinds of ways. So that was, for me, an eye-opening thing. And then I wanted to systematically go back and think about how we write this different kind of history. What are the various ways one can approach that?

For me, the other big revelation came from the 1992 LA riots. Experiencing that in Los Angeles, experiencing it at the end of publishing my first book, meant that I had to deal with a real-time historical event that I kept seeing as completely multiracial. And seeing where whiteness fits into all this. It was easy to point to [Police Chief] Darryl Gates . . . and [Mayor] Tom Bradley [in terms of speaking to the Black-white dynamics]. But I like microstories, so I turned to those on the ground. Their own individual stories said volumes about where they fit into different kinds of racial orders. You know, at those moments, you don’t simply sort of raise your hand and offer a history lesson. You actually have to deal with what it means to be in the moment.⁴

I was taken aback by how much everyone wanted to reframe the LA r...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race
• Part One: Theorizing Race Relationally
• Part Two: Relational Research as Political Practice
• Part Three: Historical Frameworks
• Part Four: Relational Frameworks in Contemporary Policy
• Further Reading
• Contributors
• Index